What Are Emotional Disorders? How They Affect Our Well-being
The mental health of Spaniards is worsening. These are not always mental disorders, there are many emotional disorders that should be treated by a psychologist to prevent them from becoming serious mental disorders.
Understanding mental health in a global way implies admitting that beyond Mental Disorders (MD), many people suffer from Emotional disorders (ET), also called emotional disorders, closely related to maladaptive ways of managing emotionality (Valencia Collazos, 2007). In both cases, these are problems that affect the well-being of the person, and although they are not equally serious, both generate discomfort and suffering.
What are emotional disorders?
Post-traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia, panic disorder that prevents work, major depression with suicidal intent, bipolar disorder or severe anorexia, among others, are emotional disorders which normally require not only psychological treatment, but also psychiatric and pharmacological care.
But the majority of mental health problems that reach primary care are emotional disorders in the form of anxiety and mood disorders, with depressive and anxious symptoms, related to high levels of stress and negative emotionality (Cano-Vindel, 2011). They appear in the face of work or family problems, poorly handled grief, or stress sustained for too long, and most of them correspond to adaptive problems in the face of an accumulation of stressful life situations. Work or family difficulties can also turn into conflicts and generate forms of emotional abuse (sexual harassment, bullying, burn-out…) and people who do not suffer from mental disorders can see their mental health affected if they have not developed sufficient skills. Mental health can be understood as a continuum between health and illness.
In recent days “Psychology in Primary Care” held recently in Barcelona (October 2023), experts revealed that citizens of developed countries had increasingly worse mental health and that Spain was no exception. The way we live, work and relate is generating an increase in problems and the National Health System (SNS) does not have sufficient resources to treat the majority of people who present emotional disorders with psychologists.
The prestigious TIME magazine dedicated a monograph to the topic in August 2023, in which it revealed that one in eight Americans was currently taking an antidepressant and 20% of Americans declared that they did not have good mental health, evidencing an increase of 40% between 2019 and 2022. In Spain, global psychological morbidity was 19.1% in 2017 with worse values for women and with a prescription for antidepressants at 3.6% and anxiolytics at 9.2% (Henares-Montiel, 2020). In fact, in Spain the consumption of benzodiazepines, prescribed for anxiety disorders or for self-medication, is very high and constitutes a public health problem (Baza-Bueno, 2021).
The reality is that due to the lack of enough psychologists in the SNS, people without serious mental disorders but with problems of emotional disorders, seek to alleviate their emotional discomfort by consuming psychotropic drugs or turning to gurus, self-help books and non-psychological coaches, who with a lot of marketing and little knowledge about mental health, they promise relieve your emotional discomfort and even achieve happiness. And paradoxically, they end up paying for services that are not really professional and that often end up causing them more harm than benefit.
It would be good to remember that psychologists are qualified professionals, with knowledge and skills, to deal with both mental disorders and emotional disorders that are very common. emotional discomfort and that can be successfully treated with transdiagnostic treatments (Antuña et al., 2023). These are problems that, if not treated correctly with a qualified professional, can end up leading to Mental Disorders. As the WHO already indicated in 1946: “The health “It is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” Without mental health there is no health or emotional well-being.
Fortunately, Spanish society is maturing and beginning to understand that psychologists are not “shrinks“nor are they only dedicated to treating serious mental disorders, such as schizophrenia and addictions. Psychologists are professionals prepared to help people recover your mental health and emotional balance with interventions, such as transdiagnostics, often shorter than people imagine. Have you considered whether you need help to recover your mental health and emotional well-being?
